The Dispossession of Tibet’s Nomads

By MARK KERNAN

01-14-2014

The Israeli government recently dropped its policy of seeking to
evict at least 40,000 Bedouin nomads, although the true figurereconvened.
The ‘backward’ Bedouins are, after all, according to the logic of state
induced development, manifestly in the way of social and economic
progress. The Bedouin nomads, long characterised as ‘unproductive wanderers in the wilderness’, as indeed most travelling peoples have historically been perceived, have, at least for now, been temporarily saved. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for other nomadic societies.As unjust as the Israeli nation building policy is, as a program of
coercive nomadic resettlement it pales in comparison, in scope and in
scale, with a much larger catastrophe for global nomadic culture
currently playing out in the great plains of western China-the Western
Development Program, Xabu Da Kaifa in Chinese. Xabu da Kaifa,
loosely translate as ‘open up the west’, is an extensive, top-down
bureaucratic program of economic engineering, and social and cultural
transformation, sweeping across the region, clearing the way for hyper
capitalist development.

may well
be double that estimate, from their ancestral lands in the Negev desert.
The Prawer plan’s key objective is to forcibly dispossess the nomads
off their homesteads, demolish their makeshift settlements with military
bulldozers, and then relocate them into government approved concrete
villages. The plan has been dropped, at least for now. But when the
world’s attention looks elsewhere the evictions program will almost
certainly be

Unfortunately for the nomads when they have
been displaced, socialist villages are more often than not concrete
ghettoes hastily constructed on the side of newly built highways.
Semi-urbanised ghettoes full of apathy, cultural and social dislocation,
bourgeoning social problems such as drug abuse, once unknown to the
nomads, are now common- a once proud wandering people now largely reduced to meagre state hand-outs.
In addition, the forced resettlement of the nomads is a function of
rapid economic development, coupled, quite consciously, with the
deliberate cultural policies of imposing a Chinese language only education.

There are relevant historical parallels. The near extermination of
the indigenous tribes of the Americas by European colonial settlers is
all too apparent. And, just as the theft of Indian land on the North
American continent in the 18th and 19th century was rationalised in the
name of proselytizing Christianity and capitalist expansion, a broadly
similar process is being played out with the forced displacement of Tibetan nomads.
Only this time, international development organisations have taken the
place of evangelising Christian missionaries, hand in hand with Chinese
development agencies. A different ideology of course, but with a broadly
similar purpose: the imposition of a commercial and cultural value
system replacing traditional practices and knowledge, and crucially, resource exploitation.

Since 1999 the Chinese government has been pouring billions of state
investment into its western regions in an effort to realize the region’s
wealth producing capacity. Xabu Da Kaifa is transforming the region and
inexorably pulling the area’s rich source of raw materials and its vast
‘empty wilderness’ into the administrative and commercial orbit of the
shiny cities of the east coast, where an anomalous hybrid of
capitalistic progress and scientific socialism coexist. Further still,
the objective is to pull the western ‘treasure house’ of China into the
trajectory of economic globalisation, as a source of both international
investment and cheap commodities amongst other things. Consequently,
there are now hundreds of thousands of kilometers of railways, roads,
highways, pipelines and dozens of newly built airports. Huge hydro dams and enormous mines for mineral extraction are also being constructed at a breath taking pace –
the vast wilds of western China ( Tibet, Qinghai, Sichuan, Xinjiang and
Gansu) one of the world’s last frontiers withstanding global capital
expansion, is being transformed, forever.

The western landmass has an underutilised strategic and commercial
asset for China. Therefore, inevitably, in order to develop the area,
pastoral nomadism on the great central Asian plains has been condemned
as inefficient, unproductive, and backward. And by the inexorable logic
of state development, the ‘irrational’ pastoral nomads, in the name of
social and economic nation building, must be reconstructed into rational peasants-all
the better to be measured, controlled, and prepared for efficient
economic viability by China’s ruling urban elites. In truth, sadly,
economic servitude is the best they can now hope for. For the worst, one
need not look too far for historical or contemporary instances of the
myriad social, economic and spiritual effects of sedentarisation on
nomadic populations. The socio-economic conditions of Australia’s
Aboriginal peoples serve as a salutary lesson for the fate of all
wandering peoples. Closer to home in Europe, Irish
travellers have been suffering the impact of state indifference and its
occasional correlate, coercive intrusion, for decades.

The world’s second biggest economy is often seen as a model for the
rest of the developing world. China’s double-digit economic growth
stands as a beacon for all who would seek follow in its footsteps- where
China goes, Brazil, Mexico, India and South Africa are eagerly
following. All have large nomadic communities. At this late stage for
global nomadism facing the onslaught of industrial development, is the
fate of the Tibetan nomads, and others, to be the fate of all nomads?

NOTE-- Mark Kernan is a writer based in Ireland. He has done extensive-research on Tibetan life, especially Tibetan nomad life. Before writing this article, he has also spent a month with the Tibetans in Dharamshala, the seat of H.H. the Dalai Lama. This article is republished from counterpunch.org